McKay compared efforts to try to trigger the blowout preventer to stop the flow of oil from the sea floor to performing “open heart surgery at 5,000 feet in the dark with robot-controlled submarines.”

Yeah, no shit, Sherlock! We got that! That’s why environmentalists wanted things like acoustic triggers, blowout preventers, yada yada. Which you in your brilliance lobbied against because you said an incident would be “unlikely.”

Let me repeat: you are drilling the world’s deepest oil well, which requires some very specialized technology, yet from a safety and risk standpoint you acted as if this was just any ol’ offshore well. And you claim that you didn’t put “blowout preventers” on these wells because an accident like what we’re seeing “seemed inconceivable”.

I repeat: You are doing something that has never been done before and yet in your brilliance an accident was “inconceivable.”

BP faces fresh questions over the cause of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill after it emerged that problems with the type of equipment that led to the disaster were first reported a decade ago.

In June 2000, the oil giant issued a “notice of default” to Transocean, the operator of the rig that blew up last month. The dispute was over problems with a blowout preventer, a set of iron slabs that should close out-of-control wells. It failed on the Gulf of Mexico rig, triggering the explosion and oil spill.

Transocean acknowledged at the time that the preventer did “not work exactly right”. The rig in question, the Discover Enterprise, was unable to operate for extended periods while the problem was fixed.

The preventer was made by Hydril, now owned by GE’s oil and gas arm, and Cameron International, a Houston company. Cameron also made the preventer on the Deepwater Horizon, the rig that exploded. Its preventer was fitted at about the same time BP was complaining of problems with its sister vessel.

Oh this is peachy. So excuse me if I don’t take Mr. McKay’s PR bullshit seriously.

Salazar said, “There are 30,000 wells that have been drilled out in the Gulf of Mexico, and so this is a very, very rare event.”

Okay, let me take a deep breath and try to explain this stuff slowly and carefully to you. I’ve said this before a thousand, gazillion, bazillion times but I will say it again: there is a reason these deep water oil reserves are untapped. They are really, really, hard to get to. And expensive. And hard. And did I mention expensive?

So when BP execs tell you that blowouts were “inconceivable” let me point out that they are talking out of their ass. Look, not all offshore oil wells are the same, got it? This was the deepest oil well in the world. That’s a whole ‘nother ball of wax than what you’re dealing with everywhere else. And the very last thing in the world I want to hear right now is Administration officials repeating oil industry talking points. So I have a steaming cup of STFU with Ken Salazar’s name on it.

Look, the oil wells close to land are done, tapped, finished, over. We are going further and further out into the deep water, which presents new technological challenges. We are, quite literally, in uncharted waters here, people.

Here, lookie, Wired did a wonderful piece on this waaaay back in 2007. Read it and stand in awe at what it takes to pull oil out of the deep, dark, cold water. BP knows this, it’s their business to know this. Hell, even folks who work for Chevron call deep water oil drilling “a total crap shoot.”

Meanwhile, assholes like Bill Kristol, who say we just need to drill closer to land, don’t have a fucking clue. We’ve been there and done that and that oil is gone. Got it? The easy oil is gone. We are going after the hard stuff. The expensive stuff. The difficult-to-extract stuff. That means that extra precautions need to be taken. Extra safeguards. Belt-and-suspenders stuff. Acoustic shut-off valves and whatnot. Hell, I don’t know. I just know that when you are walking on the Moon you don’t pretend it’s an afternoon in Central Park. You do, you know, extra shit to be extra careful.

Because these deep water oil wells are not like any other well. So when you say, “Oh gosh there are tons and tons of offshore oil rigs and they haven’t blown,” well let me point out the very fucking obvious to you: This is what the oil industry refers to as “The Last Frontier.” This isn’t business as usual. This is special circumstances.

Got that?

Special fucking circumstances. And when you are operating in special circumstances as if it’s the same ol’ same ol’ to maximize your profts and keep Big Government off your back then you, in my opinion, are a greedy fucking asshole. And if there is any justice in the world then Corporate Person BP will be given the death penalty for this crime it has inflicted on the American people.

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18 responses to “>Stupid, Greedy, Stupid, Greedy, Stupid”

>My dear, that faint noise to the west of you is this very old but very angry old lady giving you a standing ovation.I think it may be time to march to the US corporate offices of BP with Louisville Sluggers for a little old time discipline.

>SoBe,Pissed off doesn't even begin to describe my contempt for BP, the oil lobby, and corporate America in general. I took a walk today on my fabled beach knowing full that it may be only a matter of time before the sludge reaches these shores. There are rare and endangered birds and marine turtles at risk, species that I have spent the better part of last decade trying to protect. I am heartbroken beyond words and feel totally devastated.

>Expanding on my tweet, and perhaps a little delirious with anger, I think we should bring all the dead wildlife to the execs everywhere they go. In my delirium, I'm picturing putting a dead turtle on their $500 restaurant table while Wallace Shawn shouts "Inconceivable!"

>"I think it may be time to march to the US corporate offices of BP with Louisville Sluggers for a little old time discipline."Agreed. But we'd better dress up as Tea Party members or the media (Those damn liberals!) won't even give it a mention.

>No no no… you've got it all wrong. According to CNN the problem isn't BP, the unstable deep wells, the lack of technical docs on the wells, industry obfuscation…its Obama. See, anybody who IS anybody knows that Obama is at fault for not getting on the job faster, diddling away for days while the oil poured out.BP is just an innocent multi-national corporation, the kind we show fealty to every day. CNN – The Most Trusted Name In Snooze. 37North

>"The Inconceivable Mashup" (from "The Princess Bride")OMG I had forgotten about that. That is priceless.Yeah we got a couple hundred million gallons of inconceivable washing up on our shores, destroying oyster, fishing, shrimping and tourism industries as we speak. With all due respect, Mr. McKay, you can take your "inconceivable" and shove it up your ass.

>Because BP was the one that lobbied against the safeguards and BP had problems with shutoffs on its Transocean rigs 10 years ago and BP was the one who was drilling in completely uncharted waters.You know, all the shit I wrote in my post. Why don't you read it before commenting.

>At the Environmental Defense Fund's Facebook page, there's a man who claims that all the concern about the environment is just a "hatefest" and that we don't give a damn that 11 people died. So, we only get to pick one tragedy to be upset about? I wonder if he saw many of the very same "hatefest" people furious about 29 miners who died as the result of yet another corporation's decision that the raw materials that generate dollars are more important than the people who generate the raw materials.

>"And so why is BP getting all of the blame here when it Transocean that ran the rig and transocean's equipment that failed here?"Um, because they bought the system and knew that the contractor had screwed the pooch before.corytr